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11/30/13

A Peek at our Thanksgiving & some November Beauty Favorites

First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We sure did. It was great to relax at home with family and good food and really just enjoy time together. It's always nice to have a day to really reflect upon all of our blessings and great things we all truly have to be thankful for. My list of "thankfuls" is usually the same... It's never really about specific material things, but more about things that really matter. Like health, family, having a warm home and full stomachs. Things that can often be taken for granted, but that we should really take the time to be thankful for every day. Stuff that matters. To me, it's just the definition of a "warm n' fuzzy" holiday and I love it.

Can you believe Thanksgiving has already come and gone?? I'm so happy that we're now officially into the holiday season! Did any of you guys venture out for Black Friday? I've said it before, but I'm a Black Friday hermit. I usually shop from home in pj's with a plate (or three) of Thanksgiving leftovers. This year was pretty crazy because I didn't shop at all!
Definitely check out my Holiday Gift Guide here if you missed it! Especially since most of the sales are still going on through Monday at least.

We also got a bit of a head start with our Christmas decor around here too. I always like to have the tree(s) up by Thanksgiving just because we may not always do Christmas dinner at our house and I think it's fun to have a bit of holiday cheer goin' on around here in case there is family that may not have dinner here then. But let's just be honest, the main reason is because Brad and I are big kids when it comes to Christmas and we're usually itching to put the trees up come early November anyway. So it was definitely fun to have that going on too. We also kept to our usual tradition of putting up our Christmas lights outside on Friday. So we're in full Christmas season mode around here and I love it.

Before we get into my November Favorites for this month, I thought I'd share with you a very small peek into our Thanksgiving day, since this was the first we've hosted at our new home!
I wasn't really planning on doing a blog post, so the photos were all quickly snapped with my iPhone. Keepin' it casual. Much like we like to do Thanksgiving around here.

Here's a shot of the table...

I kept it simple with some disposable placemats. These are SO easy. I use these for every holiday. They come in pads of 50 which seem to last forever. I couldn't find the exact wreath design ones I have but these are pretty darn close. I like to have the cranberry sauce on the table, with some sweet and spicy mustard for the ham and turkey, butter, and some little turkey salt and pepper shakers that were my Grandma's.
Those are my typical chargers/plates/napkin table set I usually have going on, so I kept those out to be pretty. But when dinner time came, we ate on some more simple plates we had that made things super easy.Yup, that's a tree in the background... I'll show it in my Holiday Home Tour coming up this week!

We had the most delish meal. Turkey, ham, dressing (with my Grandma's special gravy I love), potato salad, green beans, deviled eggs, cranberry sauce, and I made the sweet potato casserole and broccoli casserole. Oh and there was of course, pies and cookies my mom made for dessert.
I live for Thanksgiving food.

Before we ate, I snapped this pic really quick of all the food set up. I think next year, I'll put all of the food on the big island near where the ham and turkey is just to make things easier. We had a lot more room to spread out this year!

And then there's this...

Had to squeeze a Christmas tree in there too of course.
This is our crazy 12-ft mall lobby Christmas tree. It pretty much owns the living room...haha. It's huge and definitely freaked us out at first. But we are kind of in love with it. It's an led tree that has pretty warm white lights that can change to multi-colored at the push of a button. It's pretty awesome.

All of the details will be up next week, along with some much better photos. I'll be sharing my holiday home tour with you guys showing you all the fun stuff I've put out for the season (and the other trees we have too-- I told you, we're Christmas freaks), since you all loved it so much last year. So I'm really excited for that. Look for a video on my YouTube channel and a post mid-week. ;)

K, so November Favorites... I think I have some especially great picks this month. Here they are!

My mom got a tree just like that, only 5 feet shorter :), from QVC. I love love LOVE that we can just change the lights from white to colored and even morph them with the tap of the switch. Look it up ladies on QVC. It's definitely worth it!